Ethnic Cleansing

Retire the phrase "ethnic cleansing" and replace it with genocide. JOHN CHEVEDDEN Redondo Beach

AL QASR, Lebanon - Each evening, Ali Jamal and other men in this border town grab their Kalashnikov assault rifles, jump on their motorbikes and ride across the irrigation canal into Syria to protect their homes. The enemies are Sunni rebel "terrorists," he says, who target Jamal and his neighbors because they are Shiite Muslims. "Imagine, these people used to be our neighbors," said the 40-year-old farmer, perplexed by the transformation. "Now they want to kidnap and kill us. " Tensions gripping the villages along the border here between northeastern Lebanon and Syria illustrate the increasingly sectarian nature of the 2-year-old Syrian conflict and the risks it poses for the entire region.

The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is a human rights outrage and deserves international condemnation. But we must also deal with the ethnic cleansing done in our immediate sphere of political and economic influence. I am referring to Guatemala. Since 1954 our country has been an accomplice in an ethnic cleansing. From that date to the present, a counterproductive entity known as the Guatemalan army has governed Guatemala. Yes, Guatemala has its demonstration elections. But the "elected" president simply does not have executive power.

The green flag still flutters from some homes in this desert town, a remnant of its profound loyalty to a longtime patron, Moammar Kadafi, who made green the signature color of his domain. But the people of Tawurgha, more than 30,000, predominantly black, are all gone, refugees who mostly fled when rebels advanced last month from nearby Misurata with, former residents say, vengeance on their minds. The town, 25 miles south of Misurata, was subsequently looted, and many homes and shops were burned.

Recently an acquaintance said to me that the Holocaust happened to the Jews because they had not accepted Jesus Christ. As a Jew and a humanist, I was so deeply offended by his comment that I chose not to debate him at the time, but it has caused me great consternation and distress. This person is a fundamentalist Christian and a Ventura police officer. In light of what we know from history and what we see and hear daily in the graphic news reports of "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, how can any rational person still believe that anyone deserves to be mistreated, exiled or annihilated because they are different?

In a benchmark case firmly establishing "ethnic cleansing" as a crime against humanity, a U.N. tribunal convicted five ethnic Croats on Friday in a 1993 rampage of killing and destruction in a Bosnian town that left more than 100 Muslims dead. The verdict by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia set a crucial precedent, court officials said, because the judges for the first time broadened existing international law to include ethnic cleansing.

The night Arkan's men came, Husein Muratovic hid in an animal shed, terrified, while the most dreaded of Bosnian Serb paramilitary squads shot up his home and stole all of his valuables. "If they had seen me, they would have shot me too," the 65-year-old man recalled Wednesday. He was caught the day after the raid and, with more than 6,000 other Muslims and Croats, expelled last weekend from his lifelong home. As a U.S.

The green flag still flutters from some homes in this desert town, a remnant of its profound loyalty to a longtime patron, Moammar Kadafi, who made green the signature color of his domain. But the people of Tawurgha, more than 30,000, predominantly black, are all gone, refugees who mostly fled when rebels advanced last month from nearby Misurata with, former residents say, vengeance on their minds. The town, 25 miles south of Misurata, was subsequently looted, and many homes and shops were burned.

Hamed Celik's punishment for being a Muslim was to become a human minesweeper. First, Serbian nationalist gunmen held him for four months in a concentration camp in his home city of Foca, where he was systematically starved and haunted nightly by the screams of fellow prisoners being beaten to death. Then, the 57-year-old Celik was taken to the town of Kalenovik for front-line duty traversing mountain paths to ensure they were safe for Serbian troops. "I saw one colleague from the Foca hospital blown up as he walked ahead of me," the former ambulance driver recalled, his gaunt face flush with emotion.

Bosnia, Rwanda . . . Prop. 187. Looks like ethnic cleansing to me. JERRY MICHAUD Sherman Oaks

Israel's deputy minister of foreign affairs, Danny Ayalon, paints a picture of an innocent Israel yearning for peace, virtually begging the intransigent Palestinians to come negotiate so there can be a "two-states-for-two-peoples solution" ("Who's stopping the peace process?" Dec. 14). But it's one that bears no resemblance to the realities Palestinians experience and much of the world sees every day. Ayalon claims that the settlements Israel refuses to stop building on occupied land are a "red herring" and present no obstacles to peace because in the "43 years since Israel gained control of the West Bank, the built-up areas of the settlements constitute less than 1.7% of the total area.

Along rutted streets in newly revitalized neighborhoods hang green, red, yellow and black banners commemorating Imam Hussein, the prophet Muhammad's grandson, whose death more than 1,300 years ago continues to forge the identity and fuel the grievances of Afghanistan's Shiite Muslims. For centuries, Shiites, most of them ethnic Hazaras with distinct East Asian facial features, were absent from public life, regarded as an economic underclass and the target of occasional pogroms by Sunni Pashtun-dominated governments.

More than one miracle Re "Illuminating the possibilities," Opinion, Dec. 7 I appreciated reading Israeli Ambassador Michael B. Oren's thoughts on the horrible fire this week and how a global community, including adversaries of Israel, came together to help. I too was at the White House Hanukkah party and appreciated hearing President Obama send condolences to the Israeli people and promise aid and support. I hope that this will help American and Israeli Jews understand that the president has provided unprecedented security cooperation with Israel.

THE WHOS down in Who-ville Were a tolerant lot: Who Christians, Who Muslims -- a Who melting pot. Who Hindus! Who atheists! Who Buddhists, Who Jews! Who Confucians, Who pagans, And even Who Druze! The Who 1st Amendment's Establishment Clause Said, "No creches in courts," and the Whos loved their laws. Because somehow ... they worked. The Whos rarely fought, Mostly, each Who did just what he ought. Every Who down in Who-ville Loved the Consti-Who-tion a lot.

Re "When young Jews major in anti-Semitism," Current, Oct. 9 I am a proud and practicing Jew. I am also against governments that torture, discriminate and are founded on ethnic cleansing. My anti-Zionism is not, as Dennis Prager would have it, "a form of anti-Semitism" based on the idea "that only one country in the world is unworthy of existence." I believe a number of governments throughout the world are illegitimate, including Sudan, Uzbekistan, Iran and Israel. Yet I remain hopeful.

Janjaweed militiamen, accompanied by three carloads of soldiers, recently killed 111 people in one day in three villages near Bareh in western Sudan. In one of them, Terchana, "they took the cattle and burned all the village," said 42-year-old Adam, a local farmer. "They took some food for their horses and burned the rest. Helicopters came when we were burying the bodies, right after the attack. They were flying low. We could see the pilot. He killed an old woman and a horse.

Since splitting polities into smaller subdivisions has been so successful in the Balkans and in the former Soviet Union, it certainly seems logical for California to follow suit. And since the proposed Northern California would be 93% white, the plan would give a whole new meaning to ethnic cleansing. DONALD SCHWARTZ Santa Ana

"The Microbes of Mayhem" (Commentary, May 10), about the spreading of disease through Sudan's ethnic conflict, was an eye-opener. President Clinton had said that it was unfortunate that so many were dying in Rwanda 10 years ago, but it was not in the United States' interests to intervene and stop the genocide against the Tutsis by the Hutus. But if stopping ethnic cleansing helps prevent the spread of disease in Africa, pragmatically, if not morally, it's in our best interests to do so. Thanks to this commentary, we can see a connection between war and disease.

Parag Khanna's April 30 commentary on how the "U.S. Could Learn From EU's Old World Charm on Foreign Policy" (April 30) wasn't meant to be funny, but it is. Here's your Old World charm: World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism and other assorted ethnic rivalries. And let us not forget those charming Old World gentlemen: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Tito, Milosevic, etc. Old World charm, indeed! William R. Hosek Thousand Oaks